


You And Me, We're Kings

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Blowjobs, Denial of Feelings, Enemies to Lovers, Happy Ending, Hate Sex, M/M, Steve is the epitome of a frat boy, Stucky are roommates, god how do you tag, they hate each other in the beginning, well bucky hates everyone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-16 09:35:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7262620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are roommates. Most of the time they hate each other. Sometimes, they don't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You And Me, We're Kings

"Jesus fucking Christ on a stick! Move out of the way, Tube Socks, this is not your mom’s basement! You can’t chill here.”

Bucky readjusted the cardboard box in his arm to peek over the top of it. He watched as Natasha mercilessly ground her right heel into the shin of the boy who was sitting on the ground in front of them. With his back against the wall, the boy’s pale legs were sprawled out into the hallway, blocking the entire width of it. The strange boy glared at Natasha, but retracted his long legs against his chest.

“Bitch,” he muttered as they walked past, flicking his long dreads out of his face while also flipping Natasha off. Bucky didn’t have to be able to see Natasha’s face to know that she was smiling. Natasha thrived off of making fuckboys uncomfortable.

 _Welcome to college_ , Bucky thought to himself and focussed on not dropping the heavy box in his arm as he followed Natasha further down the hallway. Only when they stopped in front of the door with the number 208 did Bucky feel nerves furling in his stomach. That was his dorm room. The room he had been assigned in the email that had followed his acceptance letter. The room he would live in for the next year. 

“You ready?” Natasha asked him, the rare kind of soft smile playing on her face that Bucky liked to think of as reserved for him.

He nodded, and Natasha pushed the handle down. The first thing Bucky noticed was the overwhelming, almost dizzying smell of Axe body spray that clouded the air. It was like someone had emptied an entire spray can of it into the air. Bucky felt his eyes water and he blindly steered towards the empty bed to his left, dropping the cardboard boxes onto the bare mattress. While he was still trying to breathe past the stench, he could see Natasha cross her arms in front of her chest where she had planted herself in the middle of the room. As he turned back around, Bucky found that half of the room was covered in shit.

The floor was littered with an inordinate amount of sports gear and gym clothes, spilling out of several opened moving boxes. Books, stationary and a family-sized carton of multi-flavoured pop tarts occupied the desk below the window. Between the opened doors of the wardrobe, Bucky spotted enough toilet paper to TP the entire campus. And to top it all off, the wall above the bed was covered in a humongous USA flag.

"Oh, hey!" 

There was a boy, sprawled out on the bed, and Bucky felt his stomach sink. His future roommate was good-looking, with his cropped blond hair and piercing blue eyes and the kind of body that could only be described as _fucking ripped._ Actually, Bucky’s roommate was gorgeous, but he was also sporting a jersey of their college’s football team. The easy-going smile he was wearing told Bucky that the boy was someone to whom socialising came naturally and if all of that wouldn’t have been enough already, his future roommate was holding a football in his hand. Bucky hated football. Bucky loathed socialising. And more than anything else in this world, Bucky hated frat boys.

His new roommate perked up upon their entrance, catching the football he had thrown into the air. He let it drop on his Superman sheets (seriously, how old was the guy?) before he bounced to his feet.

“Hey, guys! What’s up? I’m Steve, Steve Rogers. I'm your new roommate, but I guess you already figured that, huh?” Steve let out a laugh. “I hope you don’t mind I already picked a bed and spread my stuff all over it. The beds are pretty much the same, but if it collides with your feng shui to sleep in the West or something we can of course swap.”

 _Great,_ Bucky thought. His roommate was a talker.

“This is James,” Natasha spoke up, after Bucky had spent a good thirty seconds just staring at the new boy. She was ever so quick to become his social crutch. “He’s very excited to meet you as well.”

Visibly relieved to have found someone that would actually respond to him, Steve beamed at Natasha, then turned back towards Bucky. It was when Steve stretched out his hand, that it happened. Bucky had waited for it, knew exactly what would happen and predictably, Steve reacted exactly like Bucky had expected him to. Steve’s eyes caught on the missing sleeve of Bucky’s hoodie first, and dimmed as realisation unfolded within them. Steve’s gaze fell to Bucky's right arm and then flicked back to his left, or rather the lack thereof. By the time Steve had processed that the arm simply wasn’t there, Bucky could already see the usual oh-my-god-I-totally-stared-panic flash in Steve’s eyes. As if he had been burnt, Steve took half a step back and his eyes flickered to Bucky’s face. Not Bucky’s eyes, no, he wouldn’t meet them, but just anywhere above Bucky's torso.

Bucky wanted to roll his eyes and turn away, but then something else happened. Because suddenly, Steve did meet his gaze, his entire face lighting up like he had just realised something, and then he was smiling at Bucky, all too bright eyes and teeth so white they would have brought Natasha’s father, a dentist, to tears. Swiftly, Steve changed hands and extended his right. After a short moment of hesitation, Bucky stretched out his right arm and Steve, unexpectedly but at the same time not at all, slapped their hands together in a sideways high five. This time, Bucky did roll his eyes. Steve _was_ such a frat boy.

“Nice to meet you, man.”

Bucky tried to force a smile onto his face.

“Alright,” Natasha said loudly after a moment.

Bucky felt a little bit consoled by the pleased expression in her green eyes. At least she seemed proud of his weak attempt at being social. Steve let himself fall back onto his bed as Natasha stepped in and hugged Bucky. Bucky didn’t hesitate to wrap his arm around her, breathing in deeply, past the remaining stench of Steve’s antiperspirant, savouring the smell of home.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow for lunch, okay? And remember, if you need me I’m just two buildings away. Brontë Hall, room 174.”

Bucky nodded as Natasha pulled away and mustered up a smile. Natasha grinned in response and flicked the long strands of brown hair out of his eyes.

“See you, Steve." Natasha nodded at Bucky’s roommate as she made a beeline for the door and Steve waved after her enthusiastically. Once the door had fallen shut behind her, it was like she had left a vacuum. Bucky swallowed past the awkward silence and went to pick up the duffel bag that Natasha had discarded next to the door, placed it next to the cardboard box on his bed. Then he made the mistake of turning back towards Steve who had picked his football back up and was playing fetch with himself.

“Are you mute?” Steve asked, as soon as he realised Bucky was looking his way. He asked it curiously, in the way that wasn’t meant to be offensive but always ended up being so anyways.

“No,” Bucky said, loudly enough to be heard.

“Oh." A beat of silence passed and then Steve seemed to have gotten over it. “Was the redhead your girlfriend?”

“No,” Bucky repeated.

He turned away, so Steve couldn’t see the hint of a smile on his face. The thought was humorous. Natasha was his sister, not by blood but in every other sense that mattered. And there had been a time when he had been young and thought he’d have to be in love with her, obligated by the fact that she had saved him. But then Bucky had realised that he wasn’t playing for that team after all and Natasha frightened him more than anything else. Now Bucky did love her, but in the same way that he loved her parents. They were his family.Bucky gripped the box nearest to him and opened the flaps.

Unpacking was a quick ordeal. Apart from his clothes, his laptop and the neatly stacked pile of his favourite CDs, Bucky had left most of his belongings at home. Regarding knick knacks, only his crystals had made it. After he had put all his clothes onto hangers and hung them in his wardrobe, stowed his comics away in the drawer of his desk and arranged his crystals on the shelf above his bed in colour-coordinated order, he turned to the last remaining item in his moving box. A silent sigh escaped his lips. Inside was the one set of sheets that Natasha had deemed cool enough to follow him into his new life.

“Steve?” he asked hesitantly, turning towards the other boy. He was napping in between two heaps of jerseys and basketball shorts. Once Bucky had started unpacking, Steve had begun to deal with his own chaos as well, but Steve had quickly given up, spending the most of their afternoon texting.

“Huh, what?” Steve jerked awake. “James?”

“Bucky,” Bucky said.

“What?”

“I prefer to be called ‘Bucky’.”

“Oh.” Steve nodded and rubbed a hand over his face. Red lines ran down his cheek where he had rested his cheek on the side of an Adidas shoe. Then he shot Bucky his hundred watt smile. “‘Sup?”

Bucky sighed internally. “Could you help me out for a second?”

“Sure!” Steve was on his feet within a heartbeat, shaking out his limbs. Bucky tried hard not to stare at the bulging muscles of Steve’s bicepses.

“Uhm.” Bucky pushed his hair out of his face and jammed it behind his ears. His cheeks were burning. “Could you maybe… put on my bed sheets for me? I would do it myself, but it’s really hard with just one arm, because you have to lift the mattress and-”

Before Bucky had finished his sentence, Steve had already climbed onto his bed, granting Bucky a prime view of his very, _very_ nice butt. Sometimes, life was very unfair to Bucky. He got snapped out of it, however, when Steve blindly waved a hand into his face.

“No problem, Buck, I got you. Hand me those sheets, would ya?”

“It’s Bucky, I’m-” Bucky bit his own tongue and simply handed Steve the contour sheet. Steve was doing him a favour so it would have been impolite to bug him because Steve had made up a nickname for him. After a few minute of rolling around on his bed and the sound of snapping fabric, Steve slid off his bed with a triumphant grin on his face and Bucky’s bed covered in fresh sheets.

“Thank you,” Bucky said earnestly as Steve walked back to his own bed and flopped down on it.

“No problem, man, anytime.” Steve smiled at him and Bucky did his best to smile back. Maybe, Bucky thought, maybe rooming with Steve wouldn’t be so bad after all.

*

Rooming with Steve was bad. There were people in Bucky’s room. Actually, rooming with Steve was the worst. There were people in his room and they were _loud_.

“Move your cheesy feet out of the way, Barton, or I’ll cut you.”

“Calm down, Wilson. Here, Wanda, you can sit on the bed with me. No, Pietro, that wasn’t directed at you. Get your head off of my shoulder, you clingy motherfucker.”

“You should know by now that if you ask for one Maximoff, you get two, Clint.”

“Shut up, Bruce.”

Bucky let out an inaudible groan and buried his face deeper in his pillow. There were so many voices all talking over each other that it rose to a shrill cacophony in his head. Desperately, Bucky tried to cling to sleep, hoped that all the people would just _go away._

“Yo, Steve, you definitely need invest into a bigger bed or like… a beanbag chair.”

“Why you chose to room in the dorms is still beyond me, Steven, our parents would have gladly paid for an apartment that you could have lived in on your own, or you could have moved in with me.”

“No one wants to live with you, Tony. You’re unarguably the worst human being ever.”

“Hey, Thor, you want a Twizzler?”

“No, no, no, Sam, you can’t-”

It was a loud crash that dragged Bucky back into consciousness for good, made him bolt upright in bed. Bucky felt an intense surge of anger in his chest as he whipped his head around to survey the other half of the room.

A short headcount left Bucky with seven strangers plus Steve to glare at. Steve himself was sprawled out on the floor in front of his bed, his knees in the air, arms folded behind his head. He had probably been doing sit-ups before the loud crash had caused him to pause. Bucky didn’t notice how seemingly effortless Steve kept his torso lifted in midair.

A book was rested against Steve’s shins that was being studied by a lanky guy with a mop of brown hair and round, frameless glasses. The green sweatshirt he was wearing hung loosely off his shoulders and made him the only guy of the group that didn’t look ridiculously fit.

“Uhm, Steve,” spoke a distressed looking, black guy that Bucky identified as the voice the others had referred to as Wilson. “I think we woke up your roommate.”

Wilson, like Steve had the day before, was wearing a jersey of their college’s football team and the distressed look on his face, Bucky deduced, stemmed probably from the fact that Wilson was making up the bottom of the heap of bodies that was piled on Steve’s bed. Well, more precisely his mattress. The loud bang that had woken Bucky up had been Steve’s bed slat breaking, relocation the human cuddle pile a whole story lower to the ground.

On top of Wilson sat a sheepish looking, humongous boy with long blond hair tied up in a man bun, a Twizzler clutched in his hand. He was most probably the one responsible for the bed slat breaking. Bucky wasn’t surprised to find him, too, clad in the apparently obligatory football jersey.

“You think so, Wilson?”

Bucky averted his gaze and took in the other three people man bun had buried underneath him. The one that had responded to Wilson was a guy with shaggy blond hair. He was clad in a purple shirt that said “Please note that I really, really, really don’t care.” As he turned his head, Bucky could see hearing aids in his ears. Purple Shirt was trying to move man bun’s leg off of the knees of what Bucky noted to be the only girl of the group.

She was wearing a red leather jacket that was matching the scarlet strand dyed into her long, brown hair. Her light eyes were framed with a solid black line, making her gaze even more intense than it already would have been. While purple shirt tried to free her knees, the boy next to her was trying to pull her to safety where he had been quick enough to jump off the bed before it had collapsed. His hair was dyed a shimmery silver, his light eyes clearing of worry as he managed to pull the girl from under their bulky friend and onto her feet. Bucky played a short game of couple or siblings with himself before he decided that they had to be siblings, twins even, because beneath the eyeliner and hair dye their features looked freakishly alike.

“Hey, morning Buck,” Steve said from his spot on the ground, shooting him an easy grin and Bucky would have loved to punch him in the face if he wasn’t so sure that man bun and his linebacker stature would have intervened.  

Instead, he just stared at Steve, let his gaze flick over Steve’s friends, who had now collectively turned to stare at him. It was around that time that Bucky noticed that he was standing in the middle of the room wearing nothing more than a pair of boxers. For an irrational moment, Bucky felt cornered. He hated it, hated how they were all staring at him, inevitably getting hung up on his left side.

“We must apologise. Our friend Thor is a little clumsy. He doesn’t really possess spatial awareness. He’d offer his apologies but he’s Scandinavian and doesn’t speak a lot of English yet. We’re getting him there, though,” that came from a guy that Bucky hadn’t noticed before, because the guy was standing in front of the door, almost backed up into the threshold. As if he was scared of entering their room, or rather the bacteria in it.

Bucky didn’t know the first thing about fashion, but he could tell that the boy with the black hair and disdainful sneer on his face was wearing designer clothes. The watch around his wrist alone looked more expensive than Bucky’s college tuition. His face seemed familiar to Bucky, though he couldn’t pinpoint where he had seen him before. Not that it mattered.

Rich Boy, just like the rest of Steve’s friends, was staring blatantly at his missing arm while he spoke, his eyes narrowed a little bit, as if he was calculating something. Rich Boy looked at Bucky with the eyes of a doctor assessing his patient and Bucky really, really hated doctors.

More ungraceful than he would have liked, Bucky turned around and tripped over to his desk. He snatched up his dopp kit before he spun around and hastily pulled a set of clothes out of his wardrobe. Then he made a beeline for the door.

“Buck?” he could hear Steve call after him, but Bucky had already pushed the door open and stepped out of the room.

“Great Tony, you scared him away!” Bucky could hear Wilson complain as he threw the door shut behind him. Ignoring the heavy pounding of his heart, Bucky headed for the showers.

*

“What happened?” Natasha asked as soon as Bucky had knocked on her door twenty minutes later with shower-wet hair, now clad in a combination of sweats and a Simon & Garfunkel shirt. The sweatpants had been an accident. Bucky simply hadn’t looked when he had grabbed the first thing from his pile of trousers.

“Nothing,” Bucky said and squeezed himself past underneath Natasha’s arm. Much like Bucky had expected, one half of the room had been consumed by Natasha’s ballet posters, her otherwise strictly black wardrobe and some strewn about camera paraphernelia. The shelf above her bed was brimming with her many cameras, a selected row of polaroids framing the whole ordeal. Bucky scowled as he spotted a framed photo of himself on Natasha’s desk, his eyes crossed and his tongue poking out at the camera. He couldn’t have been older than twelve when that picture had been taken and naturally Bucky felt embarrassed by it, no matter how many Natasha had told him it was cute. Bucky wasn’t cute.

As he let himself down on the edge of her bed, he turned to smile as innocently as possible at Natasha. His sister squinted at him suspiciously but let it go.

“Well,” Natasha pointed to the other half of the room, “meet Pepper. She’s my roommate.”

Bucky nodded at the pretty girl waving at him from where she was sitting Indian style on her bed. Her long, blonde hair was tied up in a ponytail, her blue eyes twinkling amicably as she said, “Hey, you’re the brother, right?”

Bucky nodded again.

“Nice to meet you,” Pepper smiled and then turned back to the laptop balanced on her knees.

“James and I are going to get some lunch,” Natasha said as she shoved her keys and wallet into the backpack Bucky had gifted her for christmas. It was one of those Fjallraven ones that seemed to be mandatory for photography students. “You wanna come with?”

Pepper shook her head, pointing excusingly at her laptop screen, “No, sorry, I’m on for a skype date with my parents in a few. Since I came here without them, they wanna know how I’m doing. But have fun, you guys!”

“Alright, later!”

Slinging her backpack over her shoulder, Natasha pulled Bucky out of the room. They walked down the stairs and out of Brontë Hall in silence. Outside, the sun was beating down on the concrete pathways connecting the different dorm buildings. On the green areas in between, groups of students were scattered around, most of them clutching paper-wrapped bottles in their hands, music playing from portable speakers.

Natasha steered them into the first coffee shop they could find. Inside, it was bustling with people and after Natasha had retrieved her wallet, she sent Bucky off with her backpack to find them a place to sit.  

Bucky managed to secure them a round table by the windows. He gratefully accepted the hot cocoa Natasha handed him once she had sat down on the chair opposite of him. Bucky kept his eyes on the foam heart on his cup as Natasha cleared her throat.

“So,” his sister said, “do you want to tell me what happened now?”

Bucky bit the inside of his cheek, uttered a noncommital noise. He took a sip of his cocoa and frowned as the steaming hot liquid scalded his tongue. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s obviously something and- would you look at me for a moment, please, James?”

Bucky looked up to find Natasha’s eyes searching his in that worried, brows-furrowed fashion that reminded Bucky so much of her mother he could never ever mention it to Natasha’s face.

“I know you, James. Please, don’t forget that. I'm on your side. And I know that you don’t like to talk about how you feel, but you can, okay? Talk to me.”

“It’s just-” Bucky let out a sigh that somehow ended up sounding more like a whine. “This morning all of _his_ friends invaded our room and there are so many of them and they are all so loud and they stared at me and I just- I hate college kids. ”

To Bucky’s surprise, Natasha began to laugh. He glared at her, while Natasha shook her head, seemingly unfazed by his misery. Once she had calmed down, Natasha’s expression turned solemn.

“James,” she said and took his hand. The gesture comforted Bucky, albeit everything. “I hate to tell you this but _you_ are also a college kid. And that Steve’s friends came to look what he’s up to is totally normal. I know that you don’t like people, and that you don’t do stupid…”

“... jocks. They are all jocks,” Bucky complained.

“Yeah, those. But try to at least tolerate them, okay? You don’t have to become friends with those people, but at least try to be on good terms with them, for your own sake. I know you don’t want to, but it’ll be better for your mental health. This is our new beginning, remember?”

Bucky sighed. He knew that Natasha had a point, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t sulk about it. Nonetheless, he gave in.

“Okay,” he nodded.

“Promise?” Natasha held out her pinkie finger.

Rolling his eyes, Bucky interlinked his pinkie with hers. “Yeah, promise.”

“Good.”

Looking pleased as punch, Natasha let herself fall back into her chair and picked her coffee mug back up. After that, Natasha took to telling Bucky all about her roommate and how she and Pepper had gotten along almost from the get go. Bucky wasn’t jealous of his sister. Natasha deserved to have a good start. They both had worked hard to get into college and even though it was hard for Bucky to be as enthusiastic about everything as his sister was, he still felt indefinitely better as he listened to Natasha ramble on. He just had to learn to live with stupid Steve Rogers and his array of friends first.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments/kudos are eternally appreciated! tumblr is [@marveloficial](http://marveloficial.tumblr.com/)


End file.
